


A Graveside Flower

by SlowBrass



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Blood Drinking, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 10:29:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17242625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlowBrass/pseuds/SlowBrass
Summary: TMA characters in a Bloodborne AU. Byrgenwerth Student Jon and Church Hunter Basira are looking for Daisy.





	A Graveside Flower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fairbanks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbanks/gifts).



> Dreadfully sorry for my lateness, but I hope you'll enjoy! Happy secret new year santa!

“Saints above… this place is bizarre.” Basira said, inspecting a jar containing a dried out frog with far too many eyes. She placed it down gently and moved further along the long table. 

“It's your church isn't it?” Jon said. He was stood almost still by the door, taking in the study with sight alone. “Any sign of your colleague?” Jon asked. 

“Partner.” Basira corrected almost instantly. “And I sure hope not.” She said, holding up quill made of a human finger bone, clearly incredibly aged. Jon gave a tiny smile. “Honestly I'd have expected this kind of thing more out of your lot than… here.” Basira’s voice trailed off in fascination as she examined a piece of paper covered in several prayers scrawled in a tight hand. 

“Well you're not wrong.” Jon said, moving gingerly over to a bookshelf that Basira had yet to explore. His inspection of the room had revealed something odd to him: while the room was largely very clean this particular bookshelf had some kind of luminescent moss emerging from behind it. The glow was harsh enough to hurt Jon’s eyes, but he suddenly realised it didn’t seem to emanate properly. Nothing around it was lit by the glow, only this small patch of moss. It hurt his eyes slightly to look at it head-on. 

“Basira, I think you ought to look at this.” Jon said, followed up by a small grunt as he shifted the bookshelf forwards a touch, trying to get a better look at the moss.

“Oh, that is interesting.” She said, sounding a little excited.  
“Do you think we should touch -” Jon stopped as he realised that Basira was looking right past the moss, into the passage he’d revealed by moving the bookshelf. It was made of stone, passing inside what Jon had presumed was the solid rock the church backed on to, with small, sharp-cut steps leading up into the darkness. That same glowing moss covered the walls, growing into odd, rounded flowers where it was thickest.

“Might as well get moving, could be someone actually alive in there.” Basira said. She pushed the bookshelf aside with ease and began heading inside. “Come on, I can protect you.” Basira said with a smirk.

Jon headed after her, trying his best to step over the particularly large growths from the ground. Basira gave him an odd look. 

Inside the passage it was cold, and there was a certain dampness to the air that made Jon’s clothes feel heavy and uncomfortable. The moss underfoot had a slightly odd crunch to it, and it felt somehow wrong to Jon to walk on. Basira didn’t seem bothered by the texture. She was used to far worse, Jon supposed.

“Goes rather high, doesn’t it?” Jon asked. By his estimation they’d already climbed well beyond the house’s roof, and higher even than he’d really thought the town went.

Basira nodded. “Must be the Upper Ward, suppose it’s hardly surprising that they’d have passages up there but… well didn’t realise we had to be looking for secret tunnels. Good work spotting it by the way.”

“Oh uh, it was hardly very difficult.” Jon said, a bit taken aback. “Have you ever been to the Upper Ward before?” 

Basira gave a small, slightly bitter laugh. “No no no, definitely not. The ones actually doing the work down there never get in. Think we’d get dirt all over the blood orgies or whatever they do up there. Personally never much cared what they got up to, wasn’t why I started this, but Daisy… She started to look for information about what they get up to. Before she vanished.” Basira sounded only slightly worried.

“So that’s why you decided to look in that church then.” Jon completed. He hadn’t asked too many questions after she’d saved his life, people tended not to like when he asked too many questions.

The staircase stopped, replaced by a small hallway with an ornate wooden door at its end. Basira walked up to it and leaned forwards, tilting her ear towards the door. She turned to Jon and gestured for him to stay back. She removed the large hammer from her back and set her stance, then with a practiced motion she smashed the door open and rushed in. Jon saw her swing the hammer overhead using the momentum of her charge and smash it down to the ground, but whatever she’d hit was obscured. After a moment she beckoned for Jon to come in.

The first thing he noticed was that she seemed confused. Considering how deftly she’d dispatched it Jon couldn’t help but be a little surprised. The creature that lay under her looked wet and bloody, even where it hadn’t been smashed by the hammer-blow. It was vaguely humanoid, but with nubby appendages coming out from along its body, and those same glowing, flowers from the tunnel grew up from its back. It was small. Child sized. The thought came unbidden to Jon’s head, unsettling him slightly. “What is that? A beast?” Jon asked.

“Not any I’ve ever seen. Was hoping maybe you’d learned about something like this.” Basira said, peering at it.

“I suppose it could be some kind of… hybrid? Theoretically if you mix blood in the right way… But this looks like a plant.” Jon broke off from his examination, baffled. “I looked at the theory of that a little, but I never saw anything like this at all.” 

In truth Jon’s time at Byrgenwerth had been brief and not especially productive. They had taught him some basics, the principles of blood ministration and histories, but he had largely missed the esoterica with which outsiders tended to associate the college. By the time he’d arrived things had already been rather odd there. Master Willem had grown quiet and withdrawn, rarely leaving his seat, and certainly never giving lectures. And the student body had started to shrink too. Jon was hardly the social type, so he knew very few people closely, but even he noticed fewer and fewer people around. Nobody would answer where they went. He’d finally fled when he woke up one night to find that the lecture theatre had vanished entirely, convinced that Yharnam could not possibly be worse than the college. He’d been wrong.

Jon looked up from the mess on the floor to examine his surroundings properly. The room had some similarity to the one they had just left, but where that had been a study with evidence of odd experiments, this was clearly a laboratory. Samples of those same glowing flowers sat inside glass jars, emitting their eerie light, utterly failing to illuminate the collections of murky vials and scrawled notes that were strewn across the work surfaces. At a cursory glance Jon felt confident at least some of the vials contained blood, but of who and what he couldn’t say. He glanced at a page of an open book, covered in names and ages and medical notes. With a small start he realised it was recording an experiment. A list of subjects, with their ages, and the symptoms of… something that they experienced. Pronounced markings on the skin, growths from the spine, internal luminescence, extrusion of the eyes. At that the notes cut off, the later pages apparently torn out at some stage. He scowled and glanced around for them, but whoever ripped it seemed to have taken them from here. 

“I mean, I’d heard rumours but… Well frankly I always thought the clergy were more boring than this.” Basira said with a quietness that could have been awe or could have been disgust. She was examining a drawing - a diagram of some sort depicting a human figure with root-like growths spreading through them. Her inspection was interrupted by a screaming sound. It reminded Jon of some of the noises he’d heard in the latter days at Byrgenwerth: pained and twisted, but with an unmistakably human edge to it. Even before he’d processed what he heard Basira had started moving, her sword was drawn and there was an almost panicked look in her eyes. She didn’t even say a word to Jon as she threw open the door from which the sound had seemed to come.

Jon followed as best he could, but his speed was far from a match for Basira’s, and he rapidly found himself falling behind as she sprinted through the building. His speed wasn’t helped by Jon’s need to glance at every room they passed through. First a long, darkened hallway, with paintings of saints and priests on the walls. Then a servant’s quarters, apparently abandoned judging by the dried-up bottles of sedating blood scattered across most of the surfaces. Then out into a large courtyard, covered in strange, fibrous plants that looked like nothing Jon had ever seen. It was in the middle of the courtyard that Jon caught up to Basira, her sprint having suddenly halted. 

She was staring around, clearly intensely focused on something Jon couldn’t discern. He approached, slightly out of breath. “What are - “. The wind was knocked out of Jon as Basira pushed him in the chest with strength that shocked him, even having seen how she fought. Jon fell backwards into a bush of strange reaching plants, falling out of sight entirely. Before he could even try to climb out he heard a furious roar. Even Jon knew what a beast sounded like.

For the next few moments Jon was paralysed with fear, unable to move from where he was sprawled awkwardly beneath the tendrils of the bush, as he heard the sounds of a fight from mere metres away. Basira was quiet, her presence in the battle only clear from the beast’s sounds of exertion, interspersed with cries of pain. Then he heard an already-familiar click, oddly audible through the darkness, and the loud, meaty crack of an impossibly heavy hammer hitting flesh and bone. Jon dragged himself up, certain that the fight must be over. Basira was stood in a wide stance, tension still evident in her body. The ground was stained with blood, but Basira’s black clothes hid any stains on her. She was breathing heavily, and staring away from Jon. He followed her gaze and saw she was staring down at the beast: a shaggy mound of fibrous fur, covered in blood and, Jon realised with a sudden fear, still breathing. 

It dragged itself up with one oversized arm and turned to face then. It’s snout was long and canine, but the sides of its head were covered in at least a dozen cat-like eyes, positioned haphazardly wherever the flesh wasn’t covered in that broad, bandage-like fur. Basira had clearly already injured it greatly, attested by the long cuts along across its body and the way its jaw hung slightly off-centre, its breast matted with blood that had come from its mouth. But it was still moving. As it pounced Basira rolled to the side, drawing her blade from the hammer-head again and cutting it in one motion. She then clicked it back into the hammer and moved forward, bringing the hammer up over her head to crush the beast’s spine. But she wasn’t fast enough. The creature spun around, swinging its large arm into her midsection, clawing through her heavy black mantle and knocking the hammer from her hands. It felt upon her and all Jon could see was the beast.

With a desperate gasp he tried to get up and do something, searching for anything he could use as a weapon, but he’d brought nothing. Then the sound of a gunshot came from beneath the creature and it reared back. Basira rose with astounding speed, apparently oblivious to her wounds, and grabbed the stunned beast by its jaw. With a wet wrenching sound she ripped it free and pushed the beast back, spraying blood all over her from its ruined head. It sprawled back on the ground, unmoving.

Basira collapsed, whatever energy she’d summoned apparently leaving her as the deep wound in her side began to take its toll. Jon hurried over, trying momentarily to pick up her fallen hammer and bring it over before realising he had nowhere near the strength. “Are you - “ Jon stopped himself asking if she was alright, the answer to that was quite clear. “- going to be okay?”

She grimaced as she examined the wound, trying to ascertain the damage without moving more than she had to. One arm hung limp at her side. “Tough bastard.” She said, her voice drained and harsh. Jon wasn’t sure if she meant the beast or herself. With a slightly shaky hand she reached inside her coat and withdrew a small bottle, which she held in Jon’s direction. “Open this.”

Jon complied, pulling the cork out with some effort and handing it back to Basira. She upended the contents into her mouth, before blinking hard and scowling. “Never like having to do that. Feels a bit too easy.” Her voice was noticeably smoother and her breathing less ragged. The wound also seemed to have stopped bleeding and as Jon watched it started to scab over, the blood drying out far faster than one would normally. Jon was far from a stranger to blood ministration, but he’d never witnessed it work on such a large wound. It was fascinating to see.

“Does it still hurt?” Jon asked, happier than he’d like to admit to see the potent blood of the hunters in action.

“Yeah, in a way, you can still feel it but it feels almost good. Like your senses are softened and focused at the same time, makes everything feel… sharp.” She didn’t seem entirely happy with her choice of words, but she was apparently unable to think of anything better. “Feels good, but always unnerved me. Too much and people start going strange. Plus they get addicted, I’ve seen that one first hand.” There was a touch of sadness in her voice.

“Daisy?” Jon asked before he could help himself.

Basira grimaced and nodded. “Wasn’t the worst case I’ve seen, but yeah. She had nightmares, would never tell me too much about what, but I know the blood helped keep her mind off it. Didn’t help that her style was… well aggressive doesn’t cover it. That was why we were trying to find out about the church actually, find some way to treat the more difficulty symptoms.” She shook her head and began to get up. “Hardly the place to talk about it though.” She said, glancing around at the stillness of the courtyard. Basira turned to Jon and for a moment it looked like she was about to ask something, but then they heard another scream.

This scream sounded more masculine than the last one, and much closer. Basira straightened up with barely a wince and sprinted off towards the source: a large chapel at the head of the courtyard, the single round, stained-glass window above its entrance glowing with that same blue light Jon recognised from the plants. He rushed after her as quickly as he could, although his chest was still tight from panic. 

She arrived first and began to slam on the doors, which were locked with a heavy iron chain. Jon caught up just as Basira took out her hammer and began to break the door down. The door was sturdy, but even so it only took a few good swings before it splintered away from its hinges and collapsed inwards. Basira kicked the twisted wood aside and stepped into the church. “Daisy?” She shouted, but only an echo answered her. She continued inside, Jon following behind.

The chapel was larger than most churches Jon had seen in Yharnam, and far larger than the chapel at Byrgenwerth had been. It was largely similar to the other Healing Churches he’d seen, except the walls and floor of this one were covered in luminous blue plants, with those at the front having bloomed into large, glowing flowers. Beside the altar there was also an organ, but it had an unpleasantly… well organic quality to it. The pipes curved off in unsettling ways that seemed to suggest a pattern Jon could not understand, and the material looked closer to bone than any metal Jon had ever seen. And it, like everything else, was absolutely covered in blood. 

Jon heard Basira cry out. A choked gasp of shock or horror, but when he looked at her he realised she wasn’t focused on the chapel. She’d found Daisy. Lying against one of the pews was a tall, wiry woman. Her hair was dark and matted with blood and her right wrist looked to be broken: it was twisted back at an unsettling angle, and Jon couldn’t tell if the blood covering the pincer-like claws of bone she wore was hers or someone else’s. From the body parts scattered around the latter seemed plausible, Jon could hardly make out any details but it looked as if she’d torn someone apart. Maybe multiple someones.

But most disturbing of all were the plants. Luminescent shoots reached up and around her back, twisting towards the front of the chapel in search of something. Jon realised with all too little shock that the roots weren’t beneath her - they sprung out from within her back and shoulders, and in what little skin wasn’t covered in blood Jon could see glowing roots webbing beneath the surface. She opened her eyes and they were glassy-green from edge to edge. 

“Daisy…” Basira breathed. “What happened?”

“No.” Daisy said, her voice raspy and quiet. “Not daisy. Never was.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Basira said, with an edge of panic to her voice.

“The flower. Not a daisy. Was a sign -” Daisy coughed roughly. “Sign that they screwed me over. The dreams, the blood, was all just… this.” Daisy didn’t seem to have the strength to indicate what she meant, but Jon presumed whatever was now growing inside her.

“No. We’re not giving up here, not after the things we’ve done. We can stop this, someone did this to you, we can undo it.” Basira said, sounding resolute.

Then from behind him Jon heard footsteps, sharp and echoing through the chapel. “That would be interesting to see, to be sure.” The voice was masculine, with an accent that suggested status and an enunciation that suggested lessons. Jon turned to see a man walking through the ruined doorway. He looked to be middle aged, his short brown hair starting to grey slightly, he wore a pair of round spectacles, and white, multi-layered robes that reminded Jon of Master Willem.

“Seems to me you’ve all come across a rather unfortunate scene. A sad set of experiments, unable to see its beauty I’m quite sure.” The man trailed off, almost seeming to talk to himself as much as them. “A shame, but I shall have to deal with you.” He drew up his sword into more of a fighting stance.

Jon stepped forwards slightly. “Wait a minute, can you at least tell us what the bloody hell is going on here?”

The man turned to Jon with an expression of irritation. “I could, watcher, but I’d rather do this.” He raised a hand and, for a moment, Jon glimpsed a gap in the world, a starry void that seemed to yawn eternally in the space between his fingers. Then, almost instantly, something sprung out, and Jon’s head was gripped by ice-cold tentacles. With an almost casual strength they lifted Jon off the ground and smashed his head into the stone wall of the chapel. His headless body slumped to the ground as the tentacles dissolved away.

That was the first time Jonathan Sims died.

When he awoke again he was inside. Somewhere warm and musty and old, and a man stood over him. “Ah, hello Jon. I am Elias Bouchard, and I must say it’s wonderful to finally meet you.”


End file.
